Champagne bubble myth burst: Forget the silver spoon

STANFORD - What to do with holiday leftovers? It's the
dilemma that leads to Turkey à la King. But just when the Thanksgiving
bird has boiled down to soup and the Christmas roast is hash, the holiday
household comes to the most difficult leftover of all: New Year's Eve
champagne. Can a bottle uncorked at midnight still keep its sparkle if some
of the wine is saved for another day?

French folk wisdom, which ought to know about these things, prescribes a
silver spoon. Hang the spoon, handle down, in the neck of the bottle, store
it in the refrigerator, and the champagne is still bubbly days later.

Or so the legend goes. When a team of Stanford researchers put the idea to
the test - all in a thirst for knowledge, and digging into their own
pockets for research funds - they found that the spoon theory falls
flat. In their test, with admittedly preliminary results, the big question
about keeping champagne from going flat turns out to be whether or not to use
a cork.

The idea for their test came three years ago, when a reporter from
Germany called Stanford University chemistry Professor Richard Zare to find
out whether and how the spoon theory works. Zare's scientific work is to
watch molecules dance in chemical reactions, but he had just published an
article in Physics Today about the physics of the bubbles rising in a glass
of beer. The reporter's question left him intrigued but doubtful: How
could a spoon stop the carbon dioxide from escaping an open bottle of
champagne?

"I thought it might be a bubblemeise,” said Zare. “That's a
takeoff on 'Bubbemeise,' Yiddish for a grandmother's tale."

Then this fall, Palo Alto author Harold McGee was asked the same question
on a National Public Radio call-in show. McGee, who writes about the science
of food, once published a paper in Nature on why the froth of a souffle
stabilizes when you beat the eggs in a copper bowl. In McGee's words, the
two friends realized an obligation to human knowledge: “Here was an
experiment that cried out to be done.”

To see whether the spoon hypothesis would stand up to scientific
scrutiny, they convened an informal team of eight amateur taste-testers. The
group included Zare's wife Susan, a Stanford undergraduate advising
counselor; McGee's wife, Sharon Long, professor of biology and a fellow
of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; assistant biology Professor Susan
McConnell and her husband Richard Scheller, who is also a Hughes Fellow and a
professor of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford Medical School;
law Professor Henry Greely and his wife, Laura Butcher, M.D.

The team tested and scored 10 bottles, carefully controlled for
temperature and with a single glass of champagne removed to make sure all
were the same at the start. The bottles were masked so the tasters could not
tell which pairs had received these five treatments: open the bottle just
before the test; open it 26 hours earlier and leave it uncorked; leave it
open 26 hours with a silver spoon or a stainless steel spoon in the neck; or
open the bottle and re-cork it overnight.

“What we found was a surprise - at least to us,” Zare
said.

The spoons, silver or stainless, were not especially successful in
maintaining the sparkle of the wine. But spoons and all other treatments
worked better than re-corking the bottles. At least in this test, re- corking
seemed to be the best way to make champagne lose effervescence and taste.

Leaving the bottle open and untreated worked better than hanging a spoon
inside. In fact, the two bottles left open in the refrigerator for 26 hours
averaged a higher score than any other treatment - including
just-opened champagne.

These results are complicated by the fact that no two bottles that
received the same treatment got the same score. The researchers suspect this
result is in the nature of sparkling wine made by the champagne method. Each
bottle is a separate micro-environment, going through part of the
fermentation, clarification and refilling process on its own.

Heisenberg in reverse

Another complication might be the state of the observers by the time a
glass of champagne had been sipped - in some cases more than sipped
- from each of 10 bottles. As research scientists, several members
of the team noticed what Zare called "fatigue of the instrumentation." The
instruments - themselves - were progressively less able to
distinguish among the wines.

"Our palates were not as fine as at the beginning. Eventually we didn't
feel quite right about letters and numbers," McGee recalled.

"You hear of the observer influencing the observed, but not often the
observed influencing the observer," McGee said. "I think we have a reverse
Heisenberg principle here."

One team member, law Professor Greely, had a philosophical disagreement
with a test that used bubbles as the mark of quality. "I am unable to
disaggregate the gestalt of the wine," he declared, setting down his
scorecard.

Zare and McGee concede that their results are very preliminary and their
data set is small. As Zare puts it, "We are struggling to achieve
statistical significance."

However, after their study was completed, McGee learned of a French study
that seems to confirm their results, conducted under the auspices of the
Centre Interprofesionel des Vins de Champagne. French science journalist
Hervé This-Benckhard told McGee by e-mail: "I think we can affirm now
that a spoon, made of silver or stainless steel or of aluminum, has no effect
on what the French term 'éventage,' or the loss of gas."

Spoon or no spoon, their research to date still leaves the Stanford team
wondering about champagne. How can a re-corked bottle appear to lose more
effervescence overnight than an open bottle? Is the common assumption true,
that the loss of bubbles harms the taste of the wine - or are some
champagnes improved when they're allowed to breathe?

"As usual, more research is needed, and the observations we have made
open more questions about the laws of 'fizzics' than they settle,"
said Zare. "Industrial sponsorship is sought: So far we're working with
California sparkling wine because that's what our pocketbooks allow. But
we hear that it makes a difference if you do the experiment on Dom Perignon,
and we'd love to test that out."

"Our thirst for knowledge is still not satisfied," he added with a grin.

-jb-

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